Re: [school-discuss] data analysis

["Charles Cossé" <ccosse@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Roberto,

On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 10:31 AM, roberto <roberto03@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> hello everyone,
> i'd like to ask you if there exists any data analysis free software
> for high school students,
> useful in performing simple task in lab activities: best fit,
> statistical indices calculation etc.

The more features you seek, the more complicated the software is to
use, of courese, and you probably don't have time to deal with huge
and complicated packages.   Nonetheless, the ROOT system is the
industry standard for physics, despite it's many shortcomings (IMHO).
It can do whatever you want, but it's design and conventions are
another story:   http://root.cern.ch/

My favorite software for plotting and exploring data is a little-known
project from Fermilab called NPlot.  I see that Microsoft has borrowed
the name for themselves, such that Google search for "NPlot" shows
this Microsoft product, so save that trouble and download directly,
anonymously from fermilab's ftp site: ftp://ftp.fnal.gov/public/nplot
....

This is really good software which takes arbitrary number of columns
of data and super-easy interface to plot any variable against any
other,  with the really great feature of attaching sliders to an
arbitrary number of variables, as well.  This allows you to seriously
explore relationships in your data.

The Nplot application I'm refering to here is a sub-application to the
larger HistoScope framework -- this is great software, as well -- it
allows you to connect to a running program and view/analyse your data
live, as it's being collected.  It requires to be built-in, linked
with your data-generating code, however.  But it's excellent software.

....
Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
Logged in to ftp.fnal.gov.
ncftp / > cd pub
ncftp /pub > cd nplot
ncftp /pub/nplot > ls
v3_1_1/  v4_0/
ncftp /pub/nplot >
.....

Good luck --
Charles Cosse


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